In Historic Virginia, Who Needs Disney?

Get Serious!

Disney. Virginia. Disney. Virginia. Disney Virginia. I keep saying it over and over, trying to make it sound familiar and comfortable, but it's not working.

A Disney park in Southern California, now that fits. La-La Land. Make-believe land. Just down the road from Hollywood, where it belongs.

Disney in Florida, same thing. There in the land of air-conditioning among the alligators, why not? Of course, people would flock to it, if only to find a Florida tourist site with significantly fewer drive-by shootings.

Furthermore, both these places are far enough away for me to avoid being pressured into going to them very often, which I appreciate.

But now we are promised a Disney theme park in northern Virginia. With a history theme, yet. If there's one thing you'd think Virginia already was stuffed to the farthingales with, it's history.

Virginia has more history than a landfill has seagulls. You can't walk 50 yards in any direction without bumping into a historical plaque, a battlefield, a costumed historical interpreter or an old house whose owner will proudly tell you that Stonewall Jackson stopped there once in 1862 to pick his teeth.

If you counted up all the old cannons sitting in front of courthouses and historic sites, Virginia would have more artillery than the Iraqi army.

The history books tell us that when George Washington was marching to Yorktown, it took him many days to cross Virginia. The reason it took so long was he stopped to read all the historical markers along the side of the highway. ("On this site someday in the future, quite possibly 1862, Stonewall Jackson will stop and pick his teeth.")

These historic sites, of course, have given many of us a golden opportunity to pass on the lessons of history to the younger generation:

FATHER: Just think, son, it was in this very place that Patrick Henry said those famous words, which live forever in ...

SON: Can I go back to the motel now and watch TV?

So you'd think that Virginians already had more history than they could comfortably absorb, without the aid of digestive enzyme supplements. Still, Disney's America will be educational for that benighted out-of-stater, the average American. As surveys have shown, the average American's grasp of his country's history is so weak that he thinks the Great Depression was a national Prozac shortage.

Besides, since it's Disney we're talking about, this will be fun-for-the-whole-family history.

The tricky part is, history is largely composed of decidedly non-fun activities, such as war, death, famine, persecution, plagues, beheadings and other things that your average family normally wouldn't pay a big admission price to spend a weekend getting done to them.

So it will be interesting to see how the Disney folks extract fun from, say, the Civil War, that jolly extravaganza in which 600,000 people died. Or the Industrial Revolution, which mainly featured people toiling in dark, polluted, soot-intensive factories for 14-hour shifts. Although, come to think of it, that's about how long I stood in line for the "Jungle Cruise" when I went to Disney World.

The Disney people, we're told, are facing up to these facts and won't shy away from the rougher side of history. ``We want to make you a Civil War soldier. We want to make you feel what it was like to be a slave," a Disney executive told reporters last week.

How will they make you feel like a slave, I wonder? When you walk in the gate, will they take your children away from you and sell them?

Nah, of course not. Although that might be the only way I'd be able to afford taking the whole family there.